Dr. Haing S. Ngor is shown holding a box of medical supplies he and Mackinac Center President Lawrence W. Reed delivered on a trip to Cambodia in 1989.

A television audience estimated in
the millions will feast on the glitz and glamour of Hollywood when the 79th
Annual Academy Awards are bestowed on Feb. 25, 2007. To an awful lot of people,
it matters whether "Babel" beats "The Queen" or Helen noses out Meryl, but it
makes no difference to me. My thoughts will be elsewhere that Sunday night — on
a friend who won an Oscar 22 years ago.

Feb. 25 happens to be the anniversary of the very day he was killed.

On the night of the 57th Oscars in
1985, "Amadeus" claimed Best Picture; F. Murray Abraham won for best actor;
Sally Field, for best actress. Then came the announcement of the winner of the
award for best supporting actor. To the stage bearing the widest grin of his
life bounced a man few Americans had ever heard of. He had acted in only one
motion picture. He had been trained as a physician in his native Cambodia, where
he had witnessed unspeakable cruelty and endured torture before escaping and
finding his way to America barely five years earlier. He was Dr. Haing S. Ngor.

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Ngor’s Oscar-winning performance in
"The Killing Fields" gave him the platform to tell the world about the mass
murder that occurred between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer
Rouge communists. When I met Ngor at a conference in Dallas a few months after
Oscar night, I was struck by the intensity of his passion. Perhaps no one loves
liberty more than one who has been denied it at the point of a gun. We became
instant friends and stayed in frequent contact. When he decided to visit
Cambodia in August 1989 for the first time since his escape 10 years before, he
asked me to go with him. Dith Pran, the photographer Ngor portrayed in the
movie, was among the small number in our entourage. So were Diane Sawyer and a
crew from ABC’s "Prime Time Live." Experiencing Cambodia with Ngor and Pran so
soon after the genocide left me with vivid impressions and lasting memories.

But Cambodia in 1989 was still a
universe away from the Cambodia of 1979. In spite of the country’s continued
suffering on a grand scale, I knew it was a playground compared to the three and
a half years that Ngor and Pran lived through and miraculously survived.

During that time, crazed but
battle-hardened and jungle-toughened revolutionaries who had seized power in
1975 set about to remake Cambodian society. Their leader, Pol Pot, embraced the
most radical versions of class warfare, egalitarianism and state control. His
model was the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Mao and Stalin were his heroes. In
the warped minds of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the "evils" they
aspired to destroy included all vestiges of the former governments of Cambodia,
city life, private enterprise, the family unit, religion, money, modern medicine
and industry, private property and anything that smacked of foreign influence.
They savaged an essentially defenseless population already weary of war. The
Khmer Rouge killing machine produced the killing fields for which the film was
later named.

Indicative of the ultraradicalism
of the Pol Pot regime, 1975 was no longer 1975 in Cambodia. It was declared to
be "Year Zero," and the numbering of succeeding years would follow accordingly.
The name of the country was changed to Kampuchea. Racial pogroms, political
executions and random homicides were instituted as public policy in order to
discipline, frighten and reorganize society. Any one individual’s life meant
nothing in the grand scheme of the new order.

One day after taking power, the
Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the populations of all urban areas, including the
capital, Phnom Penh, a city swollen by refugees to at least 2 million
inhabitants. Many thousands of men, women, the sick, the elderly and the
handicapped died on the way to their "political rehabilitation" in the
countryside. Survivors found themselves slaving away at the most grueling toil
in the rice fields, often separated from their families, routinely beaten and
tortured for trifling offenses or for no reason at all, kept hungry by meager
rations and facing certain death for the slightest challenge to authority.

Thon Hin, a top official in the
Cambodian foreign ministry at the time of our 1989 visit, told me of the
propaganda blasted daily from speakers as citizens labored in the fields: "They
said that everything belonged to the State, that we had no duty to anything but
the State, that the State would always make the right decisions for the good of
everyone. I remember so many times they would say, ‘It is always better to kill
by mistake than to not kill at all.’"

Churches and pagodas were
demolished and thousands of Buddhist monks and worshippers were murdered.
Schools were closed down and modern medicine forbidden in favor of quack
remedies and sinister experimentation. By 1979, only 45 doctors remained alive
in the whole country; more than 4,000 had perished or had fled the country.
Eating in private and scavenging for food were considered crimes against the
State. So was wearing eyeglasses, which was seen as evidence that one had read
too much.

With total control of information
and communication, Pol Pot’s killers kept the Cambodian people unaware of the
full extent of the state’s atrocities. Most had little idea that the horror they
were witnessing was a nationwide event. The rest of the world knew even less.
Mass graves unearthed in later years provided belated and grisly evidence of the
violence.

During our 1989 tour, Ngor and I
visited Tuol Sleng. It was a former high school in Phnom Penh, converted by the
Khmer Rouge into a torture center. Of 20,000 men, women and children taken
there, only seven survived. Hideous devices and copious amounts of dried blood
on the floors were still present for visitors to see. The walls were lined with
snapshots of the hapless victims — pictures taken by their very captors.

Fifteen kilometers away we visited
a place called Choeung Ek, where a memorial now houses more than 8,000 human
skulls, all of which were found in an adjacent field. Cambodians say that nearby
streams once ran so red with blood that cattle would not drink from the water.

Early estimates of the death toll
from starvation, disease and execution during Pol Pot’s tyranny range as high as
3 million — in a nation of only 8 million inhabitants when he took power. Most
now put the figure in the neighborhood of 2 million deaths. Whatever the actual
number, it is certain that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge was responsible for far more
deaths than even the 1.2 million who perished on both the American and
Vietnamese sides during the last decade of the Vietnam War.

Haing Ngor didn’t just see
these things; he endured them. He had to get rid of his eyeglasses and disappear
as a doctor. He reappeared as a cab driver, hoping he and his wife would not
draw the attention of the Khmer Rouge. Nonetheless, on more than one occasion,
he fell prey to their brutality. In one torturous episode, one of his fingers
was sliced off. In another, his wife died in his arms from complications during
childbirth. Ngor’s skills as a physician might have saved her, but he knew if he
revealed he was a doctor they both would have been executed on the spot.

In his riveting 1987 autobiography,
"Survival in the Killing Fields," he sketched his anguish in print: "The wind
brought me her last words again and again: ‘Take care of yourself, sweet.’
She had taken care of me when I was sick. She had saved my life. But when it was
my turn to save her, I failed." He eventually escaped Cambodia through Thailand,
landing in America in 1980, a year and a half after a Vietnamese invasion ended
the Khmer Rouge regime.

Haing Ngor believed the world must
know these things, fully and graphically. When fate led to a chance to act in a
movie about the period, he grabbed it and performed brilliantly. He deserved the
Oscar it earned him, even though he often said that he really didn’t have to
"act." He had personally suffered through calamities much worse than those
depicted in the film. He was driven to do well so that the rest of us would
remember what happened and those to whom it happened.

After "The Killing Fields," Haing
earned a little money here and there in film from cameo appearances and bit
parts. He lived in a modest apartment on Beaudry Avenue in Los Angeles. He was
too busy helping others and educating audiences about the catastrophe in his
homeland to make a career in Hollywood. He frequently volunteered for weeks at a
time to provide free medical assistance to refugees along the Thai border. I
remained in touch with him in the years after our 1989 visit to Cambodia. He
always had time for his friends, and I brought him to my town of Midland, Mich.,
in 1991 to speak to a local assembly.

Then one cold morning in February
1996, Stu Frohm of the Midland Daily News called my office. He had just seen a
wire report and wanted my comment. Dr. Haing S. Ngor had been shot and killed
the day before — not somewhere in southeast Asia, but in downtown Los Angeles.
The perpetrators, it turned out, were ordinary gang thugs trying to rob him as
he got out of his car. They took a locket which held the only picture he still
had of his deceased wife.

It’s impossible to make sense out
of a senseless tragedy. I do know this, however: For Haing Ngor, rediscovering
his freedom after experiencing hell on Earth wasn’t enough. He couldn’t relax,
breathe sighs of relief or resume living a quiet or anonymous life. He felt
compelled to tell his story so others would know what awful things total
government can do. He forced us to ponder and appreciate life more fundamentally
than ever before.

Enjoy the Oscars on Feb. 25. We
should be grateful we live in a country where we can celebrate our creative
achievements in film. But we should be even more thankful for people like Haing
Ngor, who did more to educate for liberty in a few short years than most people
who take their liberty for granted will ever do in their lifetimes.

#####

Lawrence W. Reed is president of
the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. Portions of this
essay, especially those dealing with events of the Khmer Rouge period, were
drawn from the author’s 1989 essay, "In Pursuit of New Policies Toward Cambodia" in the International Freedom Review. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.